Classic Quotes

"Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”  – Friedrich Nietzsche

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” -Arthur Schopenhauer

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” -Frank Zappa

“At the end fiat money returns to its inner value—zero.” – Voltaire

“When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” -George Carlin

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” -Mark Twain

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -Carl Sagan

“Some day the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die, and when she dies, you too will die.” -John Hollow Horn, Oglala Lakota, 1932

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” -John Lennon

“When the herd is all running toward a cliff, the one running in the opposite direction seems crazy”  -Anonymous

“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.” -Noam Chomsky

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”― Rachel Carson

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”-H. L. Mencken

“I know very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren”
-Kurt Vonnegut

“Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.” – Mark Twain

“IGNORANCE is not just what you don’t know. It’s also what you WON’T know” -Aron Ra

“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind” — H. L. Mencken

“Investigate what is, and not what pleases.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”   ~ George Carlin

“Care About What Other People Think, And You Will Always Be Their Prisoner.” – Lao Tzu

“It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.” – Charlie Chaplin

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

—Carl Sagan

To be alone is the fate of all great minds.’   – Schopenhauer

"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."

— Sir Joshua Reynolds

"Most people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."

— Bertrand Russell

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about themselves, and small people talk about others.

~ John C. Maxwell.